The Four Steps of Visualizing Strategy: Step Two—Visual Exploration

Blue Ocean Strategy Articles : The Four Steps of Visualizing Strategy: Step Two—Visual Exploration

Continuing in our series which takes a closer look at each step in creating a Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas, our focus advances to the second step— Visual Exploration. Once featured, each step is made accessible through the Blue Ocean Strategy Basics archive of our site. For the second step, we turn to pages 88 - 89 of the book Blue Ocean Strategy (co-authored by Professor W. Chan Kim and Professor Renée Mauborgne):

Step Two - Visual Exploration

The next step is to send a team into the field, putting managers face-to-face with what they must make sense of: how people use or don’t use their products or services. This step may seem obvious, but we have found that managers often outsource this part of the strategy-making process. They rely on reports that other people (often at one or two removes from the world they report on) have put together.

A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself. Great artists don’t paint from other people’s descriptions or even from photographs; they like to see the subject for themselves. The same is true for great strategists. Michael Bloomberg, before becoming mayor of New York City, was hailed as a business visionary for his realization that the providers of financial information also needed to provide online analytics to help users make sense of the data. But he would be the first to tell you that the idea should have been obvious to anyone who had ever watched traders using Reuters or Dow Jones Telerate. Before Bloomberg, traders used paper, pencil, and handheld calculators to write down price quotes and figure fair market values before making buy and sell decisions, a practice that cost them time and money as well as built-in errors.

Source: http://blueoceanstrategy.typepad.com/creatingblueoceans/2008/03/the-four-step-1.html